Jellyfish DNA mercifully used to make glowing pigs, instead of pigs o’ war

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Science’s ongoing quest to make adorable animals visible in the dark has for a brief moment crossed paths with its obsession of using jellyfish DNA to produce intriguing headlines. This joint venture has led to glowing pigs, thankfully, instead of creating pigs with long, poisonous, paralyzing tendrils that hunt the oceans and wash up along the shore after a powerful storm.

While “Portuguese pig o’ war” is much more audibly pleasant than its man o’ war forebear, we as a people don’t have to be terrified of a new ocean threat. The god-playing, nature-defying scientists at South China Agriculture University didn’t just dunk the piglets in some glow-in-the-dark paint purchased from a craft shop, but instead injected pig embryos with fluorescent protein taken from jellyfish DNA.

The goal of the project wasn’t to make breakfast easier to cook in the dark, but to show that a gene not naturally present in an animal can be incorporated into its make-up. Eventually, the goal will not be to create living, breathing night lights, but to grow beneficial genes in animals that can in turn create cheaper medicines.

The pigs aren’t bioluminescent — which means they don’t actually glow on their own. Rather, they’re fluorescent, which means they emit absorbed light, like the rad black light posters that adorn your bedroom wall back at your parents’ house. The piglets used in the experiment don’t absorb and store light, though, like the glow-in-the-dark stars sticky-tacked to your ceiling. So if you always wanted a glowing piglet as a pet, you only have to worry about it ruining the mood when you switch on your black lights.